this icon is really missing a Kingly Beard.
you know what YOU lucky bastards haven't gotten in a while?
a THESIS UPDATE, that's what
and do you know why I am gracing you with The Latest News?
that's right! it's Springtime in Utah and my head hurts and I am tired of working on the same figures ad infinitum, so! META THESIS TIME
since we last spoke, I have submitted a Full First(ish) Draft to J, he has drawn all over it, and I have done ~95% of the revisions. I'm now stuck in Discussion Hell trying to pull everything together and make all the connections and observations I need to, with sufficient examples, without just lapsing into flat-out babbling.
Y'all can imagine how well THAT is going.
actually - pretty well. My problem is one of 'well DUH I mean did you read the previous section AT ALL' instead, where I'm just assuming the self-evidency of my Discussion Topics rather than, y'know, discussing them? So I have been fleshing things out and adding citations and comments like 'as we saw at This Site where This Thing that I swear to dog you just read about you dumb fucks, have you already forgotten? LORD KNOWS I HAVE, anyway This Thing supports These Conclusions YAY'.
The trouble is that simultaneously I have been popping back into the Lab Results and fixing things - adding observations I need, shortening the less-interesting, cutting the useless. This adds a lot of figure work, and with a thin section camera that refuses to print scales on your photos, this gets really time-wasty really fast.
(side note - the first tracks of the Ladyhawke and Kingdom of Heaven soundtracks are disturbingly interchangeable?? I mean, until the SYNTH starts, but still...)
I feel like I've been staring at the same 20 pages of text for a month without any real movement, and it's starting to drive me crazy. I threw out the entire weekend and just worked on some crochet projects I've had on hold instead. This...is not a sustainable business model for someone who's already about a month behind. Part of my brain trashfire is that I'm so bogged down in fixing individual paragraphs and adding things I missed before, that I've lost the main focus for the discussion. I AM the dumb fuck of earlier paragraph who forgets what the hell I just wrote two paragraphs ago.
R says I should put these two sections on hold and work on editing something else, and she's right, I've thought that myself several times - but all I have else that isn't Lab/Discussion is the Conclusion Cleanup (aka Discussion Distillation - so, NO). I am NOT going in and messing with the Field Results section until P himself has eviscerated it. I know it's a hot mess - the paper is as much a progression of my understanding what the hell my work is even about as it is a presentation of our results - but that Field section took ages, I'm actually kind of proud of it, and even J said It Can Stay.
I guess that leaves me with writing the abstract. Boss, please stop me from writing the abstract >___>
welp. That was some pleasantly mind-clearing meta-writing. Let's do the awful and see if I can wrangle this last discussion paragraph so I can go to bed with An Accomplishment in my pocket.
(returning to previous: had forgotten how great the Ladyhawke soundtrack is for writing. I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH NAVARRE WHO STRENGTHENS ME)
a THESIS UPDATE, that's what
and do you know why I am gracing you with The Latest News?
that's right! it's Springtime in Utah and my head hurts and I am tired of working on the same figures ad infinitum, so! META THESIS TIME
since we last spoke, I have submitted a Full First(ish) Draft to J, he has drawn all over it, and I have done ~95% of the revisions. I'm now stuck in Discussion Hell trying to pull everything together and make all the connections and observations I need to, with sufficient examples, without just lapsing into flat-out babbling.
Y'all can imagine how well THAT is going.
actually - pretty well. My problem is one of 'well DUH I mean did you read the previous section AT ALL' instead, where I'm just assuming the self-evidency of my Discussion Topics rather than, y'know, discussing them? So I have been fleshing things out and adding citations and comments like 'as we saw at This Site where This Thing that I swear to dog you just read about you dumb fucks, have you already forgotten? LORD KNOWS I HAVE, anyway This Thing supports These Conclusions YAY'.
The trouble is that simultaneously I have been popping back into the Lab Results and fixing things - adding observations I need, shortening the less-interesting, cutting the useless. This adds a lot of figure work, and with a thin section camera that refuses to print scales on your photos, this gets really time-wasty really fast.
(side note - the first tracks of the Ladyhawke and Kingdom of Heaven soundtracks are disturbingly interchangeable?? I mean, until the SYNTH starts, but still...)
I feel like I've been staring at the same 20 pages of text for a month without any real movement, and it's starting to drive me crazy. I threw out the entire weekend and just worked on some crochet projects I've had on hold instead. This...is not a sustainable business model for someone who's already about a month behind. Part of my brain trashfire is that I'm so bogged down in fixing individual paragraphs and adding things I missed before, that I've lost the main focus for the discussion. I AM the dumb fuck of earlier paragraph who forgets what the hell I just wrote two paragraphs ago.
R says I should put these two sections on hold and work on editing something else, and she's right, I've thought that myself several times - but all I have else that isn't Lab/Discussion is the Conclusion Cleanup (aka Discussion Distillation - so, NO). I am NOT going in and messing with the Field Results section until P himself has eviscerated it. I know it's a hot mess - the paper is as much a progression of my understanding what the hell my work is even about as it is a presentation of our results - but that Field section took ages, I'm actually kind of proud of it, and even J said It Can Stay.
I guess that leaves me with writing the abstract. Boss, please stop me from writing the abstract >___>
welp. That was some pleasantly mind-clearing meta-writing. Let's do the awful and see if I can wrangle this last discussion paragraph so I can go to bed with An Accomplishment in my pocket.
(returning to previous: had forgotten how great the Ladyhawke soundtrack is for writing. I CAN DO ALL THINGS THROUGH NAVARRE WHO STRENGTHENS ME)